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Shadowrun Returns Review

In 2012, Jordan Weisman and his team at Harebrained Schemes asked for $400,000 on Kickstarter to develop a new tactical RPG set in Weisman’s cyberpunk-fantasy Shadowrun universe. They received almost $2 million.

With that kind of overachievement, hopes were high for Shadowrun Returns, which released last week on PC. Like other successfully-Kickstarted titles—and like the early-90s Shadowrun games on SNES and Sega Genesis— Shadowrun Returns promises a bit more than it can deliver. But it’s a stylish, engrossing role-playing adventure that feels very much like thepen-and-paper storytelling system it’s based on. The Shadowrun universe takes a bit of getting used to. The setting is a bizarre collision of William Gibson and Warhammer, with cyber-augmented elf mages jacking into the Matrix to steal nuyen from megacorps. If you understood any of the preceding sentence, you’re probably in the game’s target market. If not, you’ll have to trust me that it’s still a fun playground to inhabit. And it does, blessedly, have a sense of humor about itself.

Like its predecessors, Shadowrun Returns is set in mid-21st century Seattle. You play a shadowrunner, a mercenary hired to perform shady work in a world full of shady characters. The game’s campaign, “The Dead Man’s Switch,” opens with you receiving a recorded message from a recently-deceased friend, Sam Watts, who charges you with solving his murder. Throughout the next 10-12 hours, you’ll unravel a mystery that involves an organ-harvesting serial killer, a religious cult, a giant corporate conglomerate, and poison-spewing spectral insects. In other words, pretty standard stuff. Although the environments of Shadowrun Returns are gorgeous, dense splashes of colorful objects heavy on atmosphere, the game places a priority on text. Between the interstitial narrative bridges and the frequent dialogue, there’s a lot of reading to be done—which, when the writing is this engaging, isn’t a bad thing. Particularly impressive are the multiple response options for your character, which are written cleverly enough to allow space for great characterization and fun interaction with NPCs, but are not tied to a binary “good/evil points” system a la Mass Effect . As in a pen-and-paper RPG, you’ll guide your character through a series of connected “scenes,” which generally run between 20-40 minutes each. Many of these are entirely devoted to dialogue, but most involve at least some tactical combat.

Players who enjoyed last year’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown or other isometric, turn-based titles like the first two Fallout games will find the combat system familiar. You and your squadmates each have a given number of Action Points to spend on movement, attacking, and spellcasting before it’s the enemy’s turn. The system works as advertised most of the time, althoughnot being able to rotate the camera can make for frustrating missed clicks, and the cover system is graphically similar but less mechanically clear than XCOM ’s. While there’s a multitude of combat options—spellcasting, summoning and remote-controlled drones among them—you may find yourself relying on simple gunshots more often than not. This can feel a bit like having a chest full of toys but only being able to play with one at a time. The promise of the possibilities is more exciting than the reality.

A more serious offense is the autosave system, which is something of an oddity in a tactical RPG. The game autosaves between scenes, so it is somewhat predictable, but not predictable enough to be useful when, say, real life intrudes. Worse, the lack of manual saves means failing a mission (or simply wanting to redo a segment) can cost you half an hour or more ofreplaying. My squad barely squeaked through the final battle, using every lastitem and spell in its arsenal. I can only imagine how frustrating it is for players who didn’t gear up as much beforehand, or who got worse rolls during the battle, to have to roll back all that progress. But it’s important to keep in mind that “The Dead Man’s Switch” isonlythe included campaign.Fromthestart,Shadowrun Returns was billed as a storytelling engine—not only an RPG adventure in and of itself, but a system for creating your own adventures. The truly exciting feature oShadowrun Returns, and why it will probably deserve anothereview a year from now, is the included campaign editor tools. Given Jordan Weisman’s experience as creator of the pen-and-paper Shadowrun, it makes sense that he’d want Shadowrun Returns to also serve as a mechanism for players to tell their own stories. Within a day of the game’s release on Steam, users had already posted tutorials and sample assets for aspiringGMs on the Steam Workshop. It’s hard to think the Workshop won’t be flooded with player-generatedcontent (some of it very good, if Skyrim is any indication) within a few months. This flexibility lends Shadowrun Returns avalue proposition other games desperately need. There are many more cyberpunk-fantasy adventures to come.

The Evil Within Game preview

The title The Evil Within presents itself in white letters on a black backdrop, and the presentation starts.

Before long we witness main character Sebastian hanging upside down from a butcher's hook in a dark and blood filled butchery. Nearby a beast of man, who bears a surprising resemblance to Bane from the most recent Batman flick, goes to work on another victim with a chainsaw. The desperate screams from the helpless man are only interrupted by the sound of metal carving through meat, bone, and tendons. And then there's silence.

It's enough to make you feel uneasy. The grotesque scene underlines that this is indeed a survival horror game.

The Evil Within: Plot

The Evil Within starts off innocuous enough as a detective investigating a disturbance at a mental institution - it's called 'Psychobreak' in Japan - and as you enter its suspiciously Resi-like brown wooden door, you wonder whether you're in for something of a retread.

But some spooky security camera footage later and you find yourself hanging upside from your feet surrounded by corpses, desperately flicking the analogue stick to swing yourself down.Less specifically, combat appears far more contextual, the settings of the action changing drastically and your responses having to do so in turn. Your character will get injured and you will have to deal with the consequences.

It is very much a survival horror in that you must use what you can find, and weapons are scant, though guns do feature, while discarded medical syringes are used to stock up health.

What's really startling is the pace, or lack of it, a sinister slow-burn even for Mikami's standards that lets the soundtrack build the tension before the inevitable set-pieces that escalate dramatically. Stealth is key, too, and this married with the game's constant decision to turn away from the visual horrors in preference for desperate survival makes it all the more realistic.

The Evil Within: Conclusion

While it isn't as weird as some would have you believe and is almost purposefully derivative in places, we hope this is part of a grander, meta statement that Mikami wants to make over the full duration. Surely no one can wilfully replicate so many iconic images from horror's history and not have something to say with them?Until the time comes, we're waiting patiently to find out - with the light on, obviously.Is The Evil Within an attempt to bring back the emotions of those childhood stories? Either way, we're excited about the prospect of a master of survival horror returning to his old haunting grounds...

Remember Me Game review

Remember Me offers players a compelling vision of a dystopian future, but is ultimately let down by uninspiring gameplayRemember Me is the sort of title that video game journalists like to build cults around. The main reasons for this are that it's a new IP that offers an intriguing premise and that we don't have to pay for it.Since a title like Remember Me lands in our inbox free and gratis, we're inclined to be far more forgiving about its shonkier aspects than someone who has to pay full price for it. Instead, we can praise its ambitions while glossing over the fact that they remain largely unfulfilled.

Remember Me: Plot

In the case of Remember Me, this is huge pity, as Capcom's latest new IP offers up a tantalising premise. Set in a neon-encrusted Paris circa 2084, Remember Me presents a future in which memories are digitised and traded like commodities Players take on the role of Nilin, a young woman who, at the beginning of the game, is about to have her mind utterly wiped clean by the authorities at a state prison With the help of mysterious bloke called Edge, she escapes jail and winds up in the slums of Neo-Paris. Shortly thereafter she discovers she was a Memory Hunter prior to her captivity, and her activities including hacking and rearranging the memories of others for an underground rebel movement called The Errorists.

The Errorists, for their part are arranged against the state and Memorise, the corporate entity behind the creation of Sensen - the device that allows people to modify their memories - for creating massive social imbalance. In this world the 'haves' have it all and the 'have-nots' are crushed underfoot.

Remember Me: Gameplay

It doesn't help that the actual game underpinning the narrative is by turns dull and repetitive. At its core, Remember Me is a platformer/brawler hybrid. The lion's share of the player's time is taken up by navigating the space above sheer drops and beating the tar out of multiple attacker The former isn't challenging in the slightest; not only is it near-impossible to mis-time a jump, the game highlights the route players should take by posting handy chevrons on surfaces.The brawling element has some nice ideas, but falls down in execution. Players string together punch and kick attacks - or Pressens as they're called in the game - in combos.Over the course of the game, they'll also unlock S-Pressen attacks, which are basically special attacks such as detonating a bomb on an enemy, seizing control of robot foes or increasing the damage of chained attacks. The S-Pressens require a cool-down period after use, which players can reduce by chaining Pressen attacks.Pressens also gift players health and damage boosts and their effectiveness depends on where they appear in a chain. On top of this, Nilin unlocks a ranged attack, which the player can use to shock enemies climbing on walls.While this may sound great in theory, in practice it's a logistical nightmare. Nilin is usually hopelessly outnumbered and so players rarely get the chance to execute more than a three-hit combo before an enemy leaps in with an attack.So while, they have access to four different combos, players end up spamming the same button-mashing attack over and over again.

Remember Me: Verdict

Remember Me is guaranteed to divide players. Those put off by its shortcomings are utterly justified in giving it a swerve, while those drawn in by its mind-bending dystopian vision will probably love it despite its faults.
Remember Me's developers have proven they have world-building and storytelling skills to burn. Now, they need to work on improving on their game design - or they could always make their next project a movie.

Remember Me release date: Out now

Remember Me price: £39.99

The Last of Us Game review

The Last Of Us is a game developed by people who understand the perennial appeal of setting a story in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Whether social order was wiped out by a series of earthquakes, a nuclear war or a zombie plague is immaterial.
The fact is, it’s gone and the law of the jungle has returned; the focus here, then, should be not on the crumbling landscape or the monsters lurking out in the darkness. It should, instead, centre in on those having to survive in the rubble of civilisation.

The Last of Us is a video game that wears its influences proudly. A bleak, profoundly brutal examination of human nature at the end of the world, it recalls Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novella The Road and the dystopian ambience of Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men.

It’s a bold departure in tone for developer Naughty Dog --a studio better known for matinee adventure Uncharted and the cartoon action of Jak & Daxter-- but their aim of tying narrative and gameplay together has never been as focussed. Or as successful.

From its sensational opening to its hammer-blow finale, The Last of Us is pushed on by narrative momentum. Story and action are one and the same, a gritty and grim tale furnished with tense horror and shocking, unglamorous violence. In no uncertain terms, this is Naughty Dog’s story. While many video games dally with the power of player choice and branching narrative, Naughty Dog exert their authorial control with no apology. It’s a focus that works for them, bringing a clarity and purpose to their narrative.
Joel has done a lot more of the latter since the outbreak, making him a fascinating video game protagonist. He’s not an anti-hero, he’s not any kind of hero at all; he’s a violent, selfish survivor. He hates himself for it, but he’s not about to apologise for it either.
Troy Baker’s terse, grumpy turn as Joel is offset wonderfully by Ellie, played with prickly fortitude by Ashley Johnson. Naughty Dog’s skill at characters and direction is manifested in its two leads’ chemistry, a virtue all too rare in gaming’s repertoire.
Dialogue is sparse and understated, Ellie reacting with glee and horror to the beauty and desperation of world around her, while Joel reacts as if he’s seen it all before, and is sick of the sight of it. It’s a fabulous relationship, and earns its place as the game’s beating heart.
While you would expect the makers of Uncharted to succeed in their cinematic inspirations, what impresses --and perhaps surprises-- is that it’s not a crutch.

The Last Of Us: Gameplay

The Last of Us tells a strong story, but it’s also a fantastic action game, offering well-paced variety throughout. Conflict with the infected and the human scavengers is inevitable and frequent, and when the violence hits, it hits ferociously. Combat is weighty and sickeningly brutal. Joel will jam shivs into the necks of infected, and smash bricks into other men’s skulls. It is done without fanfare or glory; rather as mucky, desperate necessity. Along the way, Ellie and Joel run into other survivors – some friendly, some hostile – and a large number of the mindless, feral ‘Infected’ and ‘The Hunters’, a faction of humans who prey on others for supplies and sport.
It’s here that The Last Of Us throws Naughty Dog fans their first curveball. Like the developer’s Uncharted series, this game places players in the shoes of a scrappy, likable character, but Joel, unlike Nathan Drake, is no action hero. His hand-to-hand combat skills are negligible, he aims with less-than-steady hands and he drops if a couple of bullets enter his body.
Most of the time, his best option is staying out of sight, striking from the shadows and pausing to listen out for where enemies are positioned.
So The Last Of Us, then, plays like a vintage survival-horror game, with some crafting and some third-person (albeit slightly ropy) cover-based mechanics thrown in. This may come as such a surprise to players, that many may be put off by the game’s opening hour – as I was – where the temptation to juggle melee attacks with gunplay needs to be actively resisted.
 
Leap into a fray all guns blazing, and you’re likely to get turned into paint in some of the most eye-poppingly gruesome death scenes we’ve seen since Tomb Raider and Dead Space. The Last Of Us isn’t easy and sometimes it isn’t fair, but hey, that’s life when the zombies (or in this case, The infected) run rampant.
 t also respects challenge. The Last of Us is a tough, uncompromising game, and there was worry in earlier previews that the game’s difficulty could interrupt the flow of the narrative and cause frustration. On the contrary, that death comes often and suddenly is integral to the game’s atmosphere.
There’s a danger that The Last of Us could falter when veering into straight up shooter territory, as the gunplay doesn’t have the sharpness of its contemporaries. This is entirely deliberate, as Joel’s aim wavers under stress during the panicked, ferocious skirmishes.
It’s the perfect foil to place shootouts as a last resort, but when the game forces shooting upon you, the illusion begins to lose its lustre. It’s something that Naughty Dog are keenly aware of, however, and the game’s pacing sees to it that no section outstays its welcome, effortlessly switching from stealth, to sieges, to set-pieces.

The Last Of Us: Verdict

The gentle environmental puzzling could have stretched beyond shuffling ladders around and opening doors, but one of the game’s greatest strengths is making its quiet moments as impactful and important as its firecracker ones. Using that contrast helps to weave a story that always feels whole and connected to its gameplay.
And that’s where The Last of Us becomes Naughty Dog’s finest work and one of the best games of this generation. It would be disingenuous to suggest that The Last of Us is immune from blockbuster video game excess --the total number of kills at the final stats page will still run into the many hundreds-- but it’s one of the few games to try and make some kind of sense of it without compromising its quality of action.
In that, and so many other things, The Last of Us is a triumph.
The game’s ending provides closure, but it doesn’t offer up its melancholy delights neatly wrapped in bow. This is one of the only games in recent memory players with finish with a lump in their throat. That alone is enough to confer The Last Of Us with the status of greatness.

The Last Of Us release date: 14 June 2013

The Last of Us price:  £39.99

 

Resident-Evil-Revelations Review

Resident Evil: Revelations HD started off as a Nintendo 3DS title, during a time when hardly anyone who was a fan of this franchise had a reason to Invest in Nintendo’s  handheld console. More fool them; Resident Evil: Revelations is not only a fantastic title in its own right, it’s arguably the best Resident Evil game since Resident Evil 4.

Capcom's once-legendary horror series has languished in recent years, with newer instalments failing to recapture the macabre delights of earlier efforts. Revelations, originally a side project for the portable 3DS, certainly lives up to its name, proving a surprise reminder of how great bio-terror games can be.

We say ‘wisely’ because Resident Evil: Revelations HD is an absolute boon for fans of survival horror. Fans of this franchise will know that the last three entries in this series were incredibly disappointing, due to the fact that the Survival-Horror genre seems to be wobbling on its heels.
To keep up with Western sales, Resident Evil 5 was a twitchy Third-Person-Shooter (TPS), while Resident Evil 6 was a straight TPS run-and-gun affair. (The less said about RE: Operation Raccoon City, the better).
Resident Evil: Revelations takes the series right back to the franchise’s survival horror roots. Whether this is down to the developers having to navigate the confines of the 3DS console or whether it’ due to innate design choice is unclear.What is clear, is that Resident Evil: Revelations: HD is arguably the entry in this series most faithful to its survival horror roots since Resident Evil 4. It’s nowhere near as good, mind, but in light of the franchise’s recent mis-steps, it’s still something to cherish.

Resident Evil Revelations HD: Gameplay

It’s not just that a lot of the action is set in a set of darkened corridors on board an abandoned ship that gives Revelations its punch. It’s also down to the fact that players are forced to ration every useful item they come across – bullets, health boosts – that they’re likely to be on the back-foot for the lion’s share of their gaming experience.

The graphics aren’t on a par with previous console entries in this series and the plot is pretty nonsensical, but in terms of the overall experience, Revelations delivers. This is a game that is both intriguing and exciting, while remaining nail-bitingly tense for the most part.

                                

The lack of resources coupled with the crushing atmosphere translate to a gameplay experience the Resident Evil series has been missing for quite some time. If you remember what this series was capable of back in the day, Revelations is certainly worth picking up.

And that goes double for anyone who didn’t play this on the 3DS originally. As it stands currently, survival-horror is a genre in freefall. The last two Resident Evil games abandoned the genre quite convincingly and EA’s standard bearer, Dead Space, tossed it to ape Army Of Two.

Fans should get behind Revelations. It’s the best Resident Evil title since Shinji Mikami was in charge of the series and – unless this entry sells – it may be the last time the phrases ‘Resident Evil’ and ‘Survival Horror’ may be associated with each other.

Resident Evil Revelations HD release date: Out now

Resident Evil Revelations HD price: £39.99

Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag Game Review

Surprise! Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag is a video game that exists, it's coming out this year and it's all about pirates and boats.
Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag sees Ubisoft follow up on the biggest AC yet with an installment that takes to the seas and we've had a first look...Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, on the surface, looks like Ubisoft’s response to the two major points players and critics raised about Assassin’s Creed 3. While last year’s game received generally positive reviews, it was slammed for its PO-faced protagonist, Connor Ken way, and for its lack of innovation, mechanically and structurally speaking.
One of the only things audiences gave Assassin’s Creed 3 props for, beyond its expected strengths, were the sections set at sea where players had to pilot a galley and use its cannons to send enemies to Davy Jones’s Locker.

At a recent event in London, Ubisoft revealed that the timeline for their new game kicks off around the 1720s during the post-Spanish Succession period. A lot of privateers and sailors at the time, we are told, suddenly found themselves out of work and began to turn to piracy in order to make a living.Among them was one privateer named Edward Kenway, a brash, brutish, if slightly intelligent man who captained a ship called The Jackdaw. It’s this colourful rogue the players will be taking control of as they head out on adventure that’ll take them from Cuba, to the West Indies, to the Bahamas and dozens of places in between.
According to Ubisoft, there are 50 unique locations in the game, which include three large open cities – Havana, Kingston and the Pirate Republic of Nassau –, fishing villages, secret coves, jungles, forts, Mayan ruins, islands and more. They’ll even be able to use a diving bell to explore the ocean floor.
 


Ubisoft said, however, that Black Flag will also feature a lot of figures from the Golden Age of Piracy including Ben Hornigold, the gentlemen pirate, Anne Bonney, one of the rare female captains of the time, Calico Jack and Charles Vane, a pair of unrepentant psychos and Blackbeard, who needs no introduction.
There’ll be multiplayer, naturally, which Ubisoft say will feature “new maps and characters“ (rather than what alternative, I wonder?). There’ll also be a novel approach taken to the present-day time travelling fiction, which Ubisoft described to the audience in a curious way. As the timeline of the series converged with the timeline of the real world at the end of the last game, the creative director patiently explained, we were all now part of the Assassin’s Creed universe. He pointed to the crowd. “You are all in the universe right now,” he intoned ominously, letting the words hang in the air, expecting a cheer, or maybe panic. I patted myself up and down to make sure I was still real, before peering around at all of these new Assassin’s Creed characters: the nice man who writes for the Guardian, my friend who I’d been to the zoo with early that week, somebody else who was wearing an Assassin’s Creed hoodie, which now that he’s an Assassin’s Creed character was even more inappropriate than usual. Would we all need our own Wikia entries?
“You are now the true protagonist in Assassin’s Creed 4,” he continued, revealing that, rather than playing as Desmond, you play as a nameless first person researcher at Abstergo Entertainment Industries, a subsidiary of Ubisoft or somesuch other made up silliness. The important takeaway here is that the dreary, whiny honking of present-day sulk-in-a-white-hood Desmond Miles has been scrubbed, hopefully for good, and that focus will turn to the piracy, where it probably belongs.
 
In the previous game’s naval battles, you’d bombard a fortress until the mission relented and faded to black, loading up the fort’s interior and chucking you into a cut scene. In Assassin’s Creed 4 however, you’ll smash that fort to bits with your cannon, dive into the frothing, debris-peppered ocean and scale the encampment’s walls in one uninterrupted, beautiful sequence. That’s a fantastic technical achievement, if anything, but if this continuity scales across the entire game — if I can smash my ship into a harbor to frighten an NPC dog — then this will promptly overtake Brotherhood as the greatest game in the series.

It’s certainly a new step for the series, game play wise, and like every Assassin’s Creed game, it looks absolutely gorgeous. We can’t wait to buckle a swash with Black Flag come this autumn.29 October 2013
Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag release date: 29 October 2013
Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag price: TBC

Tomb Raider 2013 pc game Review

Tomb Raider is a game about a woman who keeps standing on rotten planks of wood and falling down. It is a game about a woman who is always sliding on her bum, muddily, confidently towards her next adventure. It is a game about a woman who keeps going into rooms that are not properly affixed to the Earth, and then there is an explosion or a rumble or something, and then the room becomes unmoored and begins to lurch sideways and off the edge of a cliff or a waterfall. It is a very good game, full of exciting things to do with falling, and I like it.

My point is, unlike what most non-gamers believe, Tomb Raider isn't famous solely because of Lara's much-publicised assets. A generation of gamers has grown up genuinely enjoying its phenomenal level design and meticulously-crafted puzzles on a scale that beggars belief even after 16 years. Although I will have a soft spot for the original games with their clunky grid-based level design, the video game industry has evolved much since the first Tomb Raider was released. Despite all its cinematic flair and successful modernisation of the control scheme, Tomb Raider: Legend still didn't have all the new-fangled bells and whistles of contemporary games..

The narrative is multilayered and incorporates the essence of Tomb Raider by basing the plot around the real-world myth of shamanistic Sun Queen Himiko and her supernatural army of shogun warriors. This is bolstered by incorporating a parallel arc involving several generations of shipwrecked survivors adding that many layers of history, ranging from the Japanese feudal period and the remnants of the Japanese and American strife during World War II to settlement comprising of Russian scavengers who have formed a cult practicing human sacrifice. Although it may seem modern and distant from the traditional Tomb Raider game, it still manages to capture the essence of what a Tomb Raider experience is supposed to be. My only complaint is that while Lara is fleshed out well, the supporting cast members aren't as memorable and only serve as fodder for plot progression.

It took me about 14 hours to finish Tomb Raider with something around a 60% completion rating, though I might've spent a load of time on the menu screen while I was in the shower or making sounds at the cat who lives outside my window. So let's say 12 hours on an average playthrough, with a few more on top if you decide to go back and find old tombs you missed, which you should. I haven't played the multiplayer because that ain't my bag, yo. It runs well enough on my mid-range PC, as long as you turn off fancy hair, but I did have some odd graphical glitching caused by post-processing being switched on, meaning I had to endure a fairly flat looking version of the game for the most part. Driver updates and patching should hopefully fix this right up.
Tomb Raider is the best videogame about shooting things and falling over I've played in quite some time, better than at least two of the Uncharted games and better than at least a dozen other Tomb Raider games. It's refreshingly well-written too, deftly rubbishing the expanding polygonal tits and arse of old Lara Croft to make way for a new character entirely, one who can innately side-step the bullshit two-dimensional machismo that plagues the form to become, by contrast of her own violently framed vulnerabilities, one of the strongest characters in games. Genuinely.